No career has changed in weirder, exciting ways than Bob Odenkirk’s has. Start out as a comedy great, pivot to making award winning television dramas, have a heart attack, then go to becoming an action movie star? No one’s done this, ever! So nothing funnier than Odenkirk starring in the movie Normal, where nothing, including his career, is, or ever will be.
After an intro that will make you think you clicked the wrong movie, we go to Normal, Minnesota. Interim Sheriff Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk) is using this temp job to get his head and heart right. Unfortunately this seemingly simple small town run by Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler) won’t let Ulysses relax. Two random bank robbers Lori (Reena Jolly) and Keith (Brendan Fletcher) trigger a bank vault alarm, a standard operating thing right? Wrong! Not when Ulysses’s Deputy Mike (Billy MacLellan) pulls out a state of the art sniper rifle as well as excessive tactical backup to deal with the situation.
Normal is a math equation problem for writer Derek Kolstad and director Ben Wheatley. They have a hard out at 90 minutes: any minute longer and Normal would lose its zippy whiz bang boom action charm. The last hour crams in the shootouts scene after scene after scene, never relenting. That means, we have about 30 minutes to character develop and world build the people of Normal. This movie is brisk! Through a day in the life of Ulysses we meet everyone in Normal and understand the two street small town setting we’ve entered into. The minute Lore and Keith try to rob the wrong bank in the wrong town, it’s guns blazing. We start with a literal explosion you won’t see coming, and we’re off through Ulysses routine stops, with much more Hot Fuzz like menace ending with silly over the top murder, keeping the movie light on its feet. I wish the ending had the balls to anti climax the big snowstorm battle in town, but what we do get is so gloriously, stupidly violent I really didn’t care, I just burst out laughing and got ready to enjoy my diner meal.
Even more than Nobody, a lot is riding on Bob Odenkirk to carry Normal; most of the supporting characters are fine, but barely recognizable. The surprising action star uses that disarming Midwest nature to help endear us to him. That’s not enough though: he takes his aw shucks and delivers it to the random character actors across town being the nice blank slate to let them develop into something more than just a body you hope gets murdered via a grenade launcher. There’s a lovely scene with the previous Sheriff’s daughter Alex (Jess McLeod) where Odenkirk’s presence dissipates the serious nature of their encounter, turning it into this feel good moment the movie hinges on for its third act. Even as he’s killing townspeople he’s not really mad at them, nor they really at him, just the rotten luck of learning something Ulysses shouldn’t know. As preposterous as the big gambit that starts the third act is, I kinda bought it because those townspeople like myself would have just innately trusted Odenkirk’s Sheriff Ulysses because of the good will he instills through time around him, even with his own personal demons.
Odenkirk probably got the town name from Normal Illinois, where he spent some time close to. That’s middle of nowhere central Illinois territory from there, where I lost a Scholastic Bowl to a brilliant girl with a 5 o’clock shadow. Poor Amy, I hope your college years were kinder to you, and you found someone to match your incredible smarts there.